- A carnival and poem about different processes of representation in the moving image, centred in the context of narrative cinema, presented in successive strophes with a structure that becomes more complicated than simply representing representation as a phenomenon of mismatched doubling (as a rhyming poem). A poem in which any line could rhyme with any (number) of the other lines - the number of combinations and ideas this could produce - would this also be achievable on the page (would the page be more suitable)? A film about making films as a good way to begin a map for a journey between different island/ideas of what the moving image could be or do, a route into the post-cinematic archipelago. In the first part of IRMA VEP each process of representation slowly adds another line:
- Each of these ideas is woven together in the montage, but you have to keep your attention up to think about what's happening because the camera dissolves smoothly between the different levels of illusion and it's easy to lose yourself, you are watching the film the characters in the narrative are making and then watching IRMA VEP again in seamless transitions (the mode of capture does not change).
- As the film continues the structure blossoms out from an overlapping constellation of these dualistic forms of representation into a compass pointing out different directions for the moving image, making arguments for each, while using each formal aspect of the cinematic apparatus to do so. Representation as a protracted struggle and practice as well as or rather than an ambiguous mirroring process?
- Within the narrative and dialogue, the fictional production breaks down and the characters begin to argue what the point of their film and cinema in general is; different viewpoints expressed include that cinema is apolitical, is based on desire, is a fantasy, is purely technical, or is repetitive and finished (using representation (the entertaining aspect of narrative) as a vehicle to critique representation, something ambiguous?). One scene features a journalist going on an extended rant in favour of action films, claiming this is what the public wants and that the state has no business funding smaller films. The narrative also attempts to show the production of a film as a protracted negotiation on the social level as well, particularly within the context of gender and labour relations.
- Different ideas of cinema are incorporated into the montage visually, including early silent films, action films and militant cinema from the 1970s that different characters watch on television sets (this allows the camera to capture the crackling visual effects of video reproduction (one of these video-transferred films even features a sequence based around an old analogue editing table)).
- The soundtrack also experiments with different ideas, switching between using diegetic and non-diegetic music (as in a scene of a moped around Paris). There's a point where the soundtrack cuts entirely, putting extra emphasis on a mesmerising moment when a character in the fictional film performs a leaping stunt, a symbolic gesture of freedom in space - is this sort of performance a way forward? Later another of the characters mirrors this leap in everyday life as a spontaneous rather than scripted moment of liberation, suggesting a relation of cinema to everyday life, but this is rendered ambiguous: the second leap is also scripted.
- There is no clear answer or preference for any of these arguments which is to the film's credit. The ending suggests in 1996 the moving image as cinema was something that could could reproduced and recontextualised more than ever- cinema ends here in the film director's flat, on the DVD player among cats, serial novels and other relics of the 20th century ("Arletty, street thugs and slums" he yells earlier), sending even its most ardent cinematheque devotees to sleep, importantly in the comfort of their own homes, separated from one another. Throughout the narrative the crew members and filmmakers ultimately seem slightly bored with, if not completely sick of, cinema.
- Yet the ending also points to the possibilities of new technologies, new forms of social/political organisation, and a return to smaller experimental modes of production as routes for the moving image to take. The rave replaces cinema as a more vivid communal experience of sound and light (heightened by drugs and their attendant paranoid episodes), while the analogue scrapes itself out of existence. It would be worth returning to this sort of inquiry in 2023.